Customer Reviews

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) For Dummies, 2nd Edition

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I've always hated the "for Dummies" series -- while I never doubted its application to me (at least in some areas), I didn't think I should display my stupidity nakedly with a long line of yellow book spines! That said, the real difficulty with the series naming convention is it doesn't allow one to level-set purchases. Are the (IT-focused) Dummies books for technical novices, learning how to program? Are they for management, trying to understand the industry's latest fashion? It's unlikely you can address both segments with a single title, and having sat in both seats I can understand the confusion.

If you're looking for how to write programs that output SOAP headers, this book is emphatically not for you. This so-called "low-SOA" point of view, in which "service oriented architecture" means only "addressing services with URL's to applications running behind web servers" is well-served by plenty of other books, and in any event isn't particularly interesting. Middleware is middleware, and while there are certainly differences in quality, performance, stability, reliability and integrity of various middleware architectures from XDR to CORBA, from DCOM to SOAP, they all perform the basic functions of finding, calling, and getting results from network-addressed applications or services. Enough said.

What's more interesting in a real SOA world -- what Gartner calls "high-SOA" -- is not how one builds services, but how one structures business processes given the capability to distribute infrastructure (and other) services. That's the focus of this book, and in fact the focus of the SOA Consortium [...] Assuming you can capture, precisely define, store, reuse and optimize business processes (some of which are automated, and some of which aren't), how would you structure your business to take advantage of that "modularity of process" to better build business capabilities that support your interactions with your customers and your suppliers?

In clearly laid-out chapters, accessible by any reader, this book details only briefly the technical underpinnings; but in far more detail (and to my mind, more interesting detail) how SOA changes your company's structure. Sure, SOA is a fashion that has struck the IT industry, like many others -- but that doesn't mean it lacks value as an approach, a methodology to optimizing the business. Certainly the adoption of SOA by industry -- Gartner has called SOA "mainstream" since late 2008 -- comes from more than simple fashion. It comes from a proven methodology for improving the bottom line, using IT automation where appropriate. Most importantly, the clear case studies in this book of SOA success in real companies make it an invaluable reference. Nothing clarifies a complex topic more than clearly-explicated case studies, and those alone makes this book worth far more than the price.

David Linthicum said it best when he said "SOA is something you do, not something you buy." That said, it's good to have a solid, well-structured introduction to hand when you're doing it -- so this book is something you buy!

Started off very trivial but by Part II had become completely incomprehensible, introducing new terminology without explanation at every line.

Doesn't work at a business or technical level and certainly will not help any business get going with SOA.

Very poorly written book - don't waste your money.

Still searching for a book or website that actually helps someone get going on what looks like it should be a good methodology.

The best resource for the S.O.A. professional. Cuts out all the boring jabber and gets to the point!

Picked up a copy of this book from the library, and was very disappointed.

It is full of stupid jokes, the table of contents is mostly useless because of the childish and uninformative chapter/section titles.

More than 50% of the book is useless fluff like "OK so you really want to know what service oriented architecture is? That's good, hold on, it won't be too hard -- you'll understand all of this later. Don't be scared off by these very technical terms -- we'll get through it...." --- PAGE AFTER PAGE of it. You will (literally) learn more from the Wikipedia article on SOA than you will from this entire book.

If you want a good book on the subject, get "SOA in Practice" by Nicolai Josuttis instead -- it is much clearer, more interesting, and in-depth.

Do not waste your money on this book -- get it from a library or a dumpster.

This book should be titled: "Vendor Oriented Software."

The one thing that most people agree upon with SOA is that there is a lot of confusion. This book unfortunately adds to that confusion.

The second thing that most people agree upon is that the vendors of SOA related software can not help themselves but define SOA as best suites what they are selling.

Unfortunately, the authors of this book look at SOA from the Vendors perspective, as opposed to defining SOA from the perspective of the those that are actually using it as an efficient and effective means of empowering their enterprise architecture.

Given that SOA tooling is on a strong march to commoditization via open source there advice is rendered all the more irrelevant as software vendors increasingly cannot compete with the free army or best practices being applied in open source software.

All that aside, if you are really interested in learning SOA and not VOA, here is my suggestion of what to read and the order to read it in:

- Vendor agnostic introduction to the concepts >> Enterprise Service Bus by David Chappell

- Intermediate review of the fundamentals >> SOA in Practice by Nicolai M. Josuttis

- Intermediate do it yourself with Open Source >> SOA Using Java Web Services by Mark Hansen

- Advanced enterprise review of the issues >> Any of the SOA books by by Thomas Erl

- Deep dive for doing it yourself at the nuts and bolts level >> Building Web Services by Steve Graham et al

Good luck!

Stupidly I thought that if a book made it to a 2nd edition it must be good . . . but alas not so. I should have read the reviews first. In the end I learned more from Wikipedia than this book =(

Wow - what a waste! It's one thing to waste the money but it's all the more painful when you also waste time reading just to realize you wasted money on a book.

Funny enough wikipedia has been more helpful than this book > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture